Hubert Seipel: Trust in the Lord and Live Your Life (Part 1)
Meet 97-year-old WWII veteran Hubert Seipel. After growing up during the Great Depression, he enlisted in the Navy when he was just 17 and served in the Pacific aboard the USS Lexington. He reflects on his experiences during World War II, his thoughts on the changing fabric of American society, and his memories of family and hard work. Tune in to this episode to hear his wisdom.
Hear his stories about:
getting electricity for the first time
his widowed mom raising seven children during the Great Depression
the various jobs he did to help support his family, including delivering newspapers as a kid
life aboard the USS Lexington, including the end of the war
Be sure to listen to Part 2 for the rest of Hubert Seipels’ story.
Image courtesy of the Seipel family.
“You just did what you had to do. Times were tough, but we made it through. You learned to appreciate what you had and worked hard for it.”
Read the Transcript of Episode 1
Wisdom of Age, Episode 1
Hubert Seipel: Trust in the Lord and Live Your Life (Part 1)
Stacy: Okay. Perfect.
Hubert: And you can be Hubert. I'm not necessarily Mr. Seipel.
Stacy: Oh, okay. Well, thank you, Hubert. I will do that.
Hubert: That's great. All systems are going on.
Stacy: All systems, I think, are go.
Stacy (as narrator): Welcome to the Wisdom of Age podcast, where we journey with our elders back in time, learning about life as they lived it and the lessons they learned along the way. I'm Stacy Raine. Hubert Seipel graduated from high school in 1944. Within two weeks, all of his male classmates had left Maryville, Missouri, and headed off to war. He said he was practically the only one left, still just 17 years old. He wouldn't be 18 until the following November. So he talked his mom into letting him enlist.
Hubert: She said she knew I was going to the draft. My older brother was already in the Navy, and she knew as soon as they got 18, it was obvious that they were driving ... the draft just needed everybody they could get, so in that way, she kind of conceded, and I just said I'd rather be sleeping on, in the Navy on a ship, maybe, or something, I'd be digging in a foxhole, and I think that's what kind of convinced her there. So rather than get drafted and possibly be in the Army or something else, I talked my mother into letting me enlist. I was only 17, so she had to go down and sign for me.
Stacy (as narrator): When Hubert was just a little boy, he'd seen a Life magazine article about life in the Navy. He said it had sparked an interest in that kid from the Midwest, and it stuck with him all those years. He called it early recruiting, because when the time came, it was the Navy he joined.
Hubert: That's really the way I got into the service, was the fact that wartime I was either going to be drafted or when I hit 18, so I just enlisted a little bit early to be in the Navy, you know. I enjoyed being in the Navy. I really did.
Stacy: When you were signing the papers, do you remember what was going through your mind that day?
Hubert: No, not really. I knew I was making a commitment, but I think at that time, maybe the feeling was different. I, I remember sitting on the front porch December 7th, 1941, when my mother called out from the house, we had no radio, of course there was no TV in those days, and said, they just announced that the Japanese had gone to Pearl Harbor.
And being a kid, I thought, well, I'll be over before I get old enough to be there, but it lasted long enough, so. In those days, I think everybody kind of thought about serving your country. Now I'm not too sure that, uh, that feeling is still there. The desire just isn't there to serve.
Stacy: Why do you think that is?
Hubert: I don't know. It's, uh, the whole change in the fabric of the country, I believe. We just don't have the same values, the same safety. It's like the Kansas City thing. Who would have thought that 20 years ago, something like that would happen? Kids with guns start running a perfectly great day. It's just the moral fiber of the country is kind of went way way down.
Stacy: I wanted to talk about Hubert's thoughts on the moral fiber of our country, as he put it, but first I wanted to know more about his mom. I was imagining taking my 17-year-old down to the recruiting office at the height of World War II. I asked if she'd always been that supportive of the things he wanted to do.
Hubert: Well, she was very, she had a big load. My father died when I was five and there was seven children. And mother raised them alone and went through the depression and everything else, so she was a pretty strong woman.
Stacy: Yeah.
Hubert: I had to get older for her to realize all the jobs she had done.
Stacy: She sounds like quite a woman.
Hubert: Yeah, she really was, but you have to get older to realize it.
Stacy: Yeah. I think you're right.
Stacy (as narrator): Hubert's mom did have quite a big load, as he said, with seven children to care for on her own after her husband died. I asked Hubert to tell me a little bit about his six siblings, so he went in order, first telling me about his oldest brother who had a developmental disability, which he said was another challenge for his mom.
He told me about his older sister who became a nun and how she died in a tragic car accident one Christmas day at the age of 49. Hubert was the one that had to go identify her at the hospital and then go back and tell his mom the news. He told me about Roy, the brother who was already in the Navy when Hubert went to sign up.
And then two more sisters, one older and one younger. The younger sister and Roy ended up marrying a pair of siblings from another family. Then he got to the seventh child, the youngest, Norbert. It was Norbert his mom had been pregnant with when his dad passed away.
Hubert: And, of course, my youngest brother Norbert, he died on his fifth birthday with meningitis. And my oldest sister Catherine had it first and they thought she would be a loser, but she came out of it. Norbert got it later, but he didn't come out of it. And that's pretty well it. Everybody has done well. Nobody's set the world on fire, but nobody ended up in jail, so I guess we turned out pretty good.
Stacy: Well, it's one thing I feel like as parents today, we really are so lucky to have modern medicine, and a lot of mothers don't have to experience that loss that your mom felt. It's one good progression, I think, with medicine is we can cure a lot of the things now that we couldn't then. Right.
Hubert: That's right. I think my father would probably still be alive, but he got kicked by a mule. Got gangrene and they couldn't handle it, and that's what he died from, it seems.
Stacy: Oh, wow.
Hubert: Simple almost. Shouldn't have happened, but it did.
Stacy (as narrator): I imagine the sheer terror his mom might have felt at being left alone with six children to clothe, feed, and shelter, and one on the way. Hubert was born in 1926, and by this time he's only five years old. It's 1931, and the Great Depression is raging. I said to him that a lot of us today probably don't have a solid understanding of what the Great Depression was really like.
Hubert: No, I don't really believe that the generation today has a clear understanding. A concept of how really the Great Depression was. I mean, it was after the crash of Wall Street and then, of course, and the Midwest also hit the drought for about five years of continuous drought. One year then we had grasshoppers, ate up what was left.
The next year was chinch bugs, and we didn't have the chemicals and stuff that they have today, so it was a very tough time. Hardly everything kind of started to gel out in the mid 30s and started to get a little better weather and things turned around a little bit and then pretty soon in ‘39 the edge of the war got started and actually I guess wartime factory and everything picked things up and made the complete turnaround from the depression.
Stacy: Do you ever remember your mom talking about? The depression as you were a kid?
Hubert: No, we just realized we was in it. And of course, my father passed away, uh, before we moved to town. And, uh, he, I think was actually, had been a, a very successful farmer. But when he died, uh, of course everything had to be sold. He had the first threshing machine in the county and, uh, everything just went berserk, of course, after we passed away and we moved to town.
So it was a whole different life after that. But, we just did what we could. Mother worked two or three jobs. Just everything to keep the family together. I didn't really realize at that time what a job she did do until I got older.
Stacy: She had seven kids. She's working two or three jobs.
Hubert: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, it was a product of the Depression. Roosevelt had started the so called WPA for Men, and they had the women working in sewing rooms, and she worked in the sewing room, and made clothes that they in turn gave away to people who didn't have any clothes to start with, I guess. And then she also, uh, baked bread for the neighbors. Then at night, we used to go up and clean up a beauty parlor. Every night, I'd go up sometimes and help, or one of us would go along. We kids might have worked, but everything wasn't a family pot.
Stacy: What was an average day like? You said you were five when your dad passed away and you moved to town, you sold the farm, moved to town.
Hubert: Yes. Well, we didn't own the farm. Of course, we were just renting. You see, we were just getting started. And, uh, and he did have livestock and, and as I said, he had the, the threshing machine, which is a community thing. He did thresh for different people in the area. But he was renting the farm at that time.
Stacy (as narrator): I'm going to interject here because I had no idea what a threshing machine was, so in case you don't either, it's a type of farming equipment used in those days that separates the grain from the stalk and the husk. Today, combine harvesters do that farming job along with many others. I asked Hubert what it was like for him to move from the farm into the city at such a young age.
Hubert: Well, it was a strange, sudden change, I mean, actually being in the country, you know, came to town right maybe once in a while for groceries or something and sometimes we got to go along maybe not and then of course Sundays came in for church and that was about as much as you had seen in town.
So It was quite a change and of course playing the neighbors and the neighborhood kids playing in summertime and stuff, but it was just a total change from rural life, but like small town everybody kind of knew everybody and you didn't worry about locking your doors or anything else. It was quite a, quite a different times than it is today.
Stacy: Would you describe your home in the city for me? Your childhood home in the city?
Hubert: Well, it was a kind of a frame house. I don't know how long it's been built before we moved to town, but I do know one thing. Unfortunately for the family, I didn't realize again until I got older, but my grandpa Seipel died just about a month after my dad died.
And I know later on one time, mother called us together and, uh. She said, Now, I know this money was really yours because it's from your grandpa's estate, but I think we got nine hundred and some dollars. You know, we had a chance to buy the house we were living in for a thousand dollars, which she used that and paid off five dollars every month, paid off the balance of it. So that gives you an idea of how tough things were.
Stacy: Yeah.
Hubert: I mean the house, it was not nothing fancy. We didn't have running water and electricity. It was several years before we got electricity and a little farther along before we got running water. So we had the moon, moon-in-the-door-outhouse there for years. It was, it was pretty primitive, but we got by.
Stacy: What was it like when you first got electricity? What was it like? What was that day like?
Hubert: Yeah. Oh, that was really something. Go over and flip a switch and have light. Yeah. That was something. And I remember as a kid, I don't remember a whole lot about my father, but they had the, uh, what's they called coal and gas lamps in those days. And they burned gasoline and they pumped up under pressure and they would spray out the flame and get up really bright light. But mother would never light them. And so, Dad would be working till late, and so the first week we had just the old coal oil lamps, which didn't put out very much light.
And it was just amazing when he would come in and he'd light that light, and then we had real good light. And I remember after he died, we never lit that light again. It was just, she just wouldn't light it, didn't trust it, I guess. But,
Stacy: Yeah.
Hubert: So like I said, there little coal or lamps and if you've been familiar with, they don't really put out a whole lot of light studying books and doing homework and stuff. The electricity was quite a, quite a change.
Stacy: I bet it was. And then running water after that.
Hubert: And then even at that, there was even more, so, yeah.
Stacy: Wow. What was it like when you got running water? You gotta just turn on the tap.
Hubert: Well, it was, it probably because we had, of course, a good well and we pumped water and kept the water bucket and the drink water in a little fountain inside the house. And, of course, Saturday night was the bathtub on the back room there and you'd take a Saturday night bath. Sometimes you'd get pretty warm water, you know, it was a little cool, but it was, it was great. But, I think probably still electricity was more a change than, than the water.
Stacy: I can't, that must have been something else. So, what are some of the things that you all would do in the evenings?
Hubert: Well, we had card games. I remember my mother would play cards with us if she had time. Otherwise, we played amongst ourselves. We played Flinch was one game, it was kind of a numbers game. You also kinda learned to count I guess and pledge. And I think we had another one. It was touring cards. It had different pictures of different places.
Then of course, as we got older, we played Pitch. There's several variations of Pitch, which is still around today, I think. I go down to the senior citizens. I don't play, but there's a group there that plays Pitch pretty regular every day. And then we had checkers, of course, to play checkers. If you didn't get mad at each other, you could play checkers.
And then Chinese checkers came along, and that was a lot of fun. It was more simple. You didn't have the thoughts with the checkers like we did, I guess. It's just different games like that. And, of course, outside, girls played hopscotch, boys played chess. We had a baseball diamond. Played ball, uh, and the neighborhood kids together, and so it was all just playing pretty much different games. There was, there was no going to movies, stuff like that, so we pretty much entertained ourselves.
Stacy: Sounds like you have plenty of ways to pass the time and have fun.
Hubert: True.
Stacy (as narrator): When I asked Hubert to tell me more about his childhood, he talked a lot about the different types of work they did and the jobs they had, and I thought that was incredibly telling of the times in which he grew up.
Everybody worked hard, he said. You didn't have a lot, but you took care of yourselves. The kids often took care of each other, he told me, with the oldest sister, the one who eventually became the nun, doing the bulk of the caretaking. He said some of the kids had garden work, usually pulling up the weeds and raising vegetables for his mother to can for the winter. Then he talked about some of the jobs he did outside of the home.
Hubert: Well, as I was growing up, of course, I worked about anything you could get to do in those days. We're right in the heart of the Depression and money was scarce. Everybody was broke, so it was all in the same boat, but we tried to mow the lawns, clean out ashes, everything. Sometimes we may get a quarter. Once in a while, I have a 50-cent day job.
Stacy (as narrator): In case you're wondering, when he says he cleaned out ashes, he's referring to some of the work he'd do for the couple of old maids, as he called them, that lived nearby. In the houses back then, there was a little chute from the fireplace down to the basement where the ashes would collect. On Saturdays, he said, it was his job to go down and bring them out of the basement and clean up. Sometimes they have a few more chores for him as well.
Hubert: As I got older, then I started working for my uncle out at the farm, and uh, except during the winter, of course, I lived in town and went to school, but when school was out, I spent quite a bit of my time at, he was my godfather also, and so I spent most of the summer working out at his farm.
And then as I got up into high school, of course, I had a couple jobs. I think my first job was at the, uh, the ice cream parlor, which they don't have those anymore, but I think I made, uh 8 dollars a week and social security come in at that time and I had to get a social security number. And I think the first week I got the eight cents taken out of my check for the first name for social security. So quite a change from today, isn't it?
Stacy: Yeah, it is. My first job was at an ice cream shop. I think it's a great first job.
Hubert: Well, it was. Didn't pay very much, but could eat all the ice cream that morning.
Stacy: Exactly. My question for you is, though, do you still like ice cream?
Hubert: Oh, yes, I do. Yeah, I still love it. It was a local creamery in Iowa, actually, and they had the shop in Maryville, and they had the best ice cream I think I've ever tasted. Baskin Robbins is all included.
Stacy: That sounds delicious.
Stacy (as narrator): Hubert mentions working at his uncle's farm each summer, so I asked him about that experience. He said he started going there from the time he was 11 or 12 years old. They didn't have any children, and he said they probably thought it would help his mother some and give her one less person to worry about.
It sounded like he had the same routine day after day. He'd go out in the morning, milk the cows, feed the pigs, bring the horses in to harness to go out into the fields, because everything was done with horses back then. And then in the evenings, bring the cows back in and put the horses out. It was intensive hand labor, he recalled.
There was no electricity at the farm, no inside plumbing. I commented that he was now going back and forth between having electricity in the city to having none on the farm, and he said, well, it was just a way of life back then. You didn't think about it much, except to think how lucky you were that you had it in town.
Another job Hubert had as a teenager was a delivery boy for the Maryville Forum newspaper. It was pretty competitive to get a job delivering papers back then, so he started as a substitute during his sophomore year of high school. He told me he went out with another boy, learned his route, and then on the nights that that boy couldn't deliver, Hubert would take over.
Hubert: I didn't get a route until I was in my senior year at high school. I worked substitute during my sophomore and junior year.
Stacy: And it took you a while to get a route because they were so popular?
Hubert: Yes. Well, it was just everybody wanting a job, and, uh, and that just wasn't enough part-time jobs – we didn’t have McDonald's, all the other things you got today, which came on great, and now they're having trouble getting work because people don't want to do that, I guess, anymore.
Stacy: So did you, did you walk to deliver the paper?
Hubert: Oh, yeah. Well, you could ride your bicycle, but it's actually, you need to do a better job. You had to, in those days, you had to get up on the porches or they was griping at the circulation man, about the kid didn't get his paper up on the porch for him and it got wet or something.
So, it was easier to walk and get it done. You might ride your bike out to where your route started and then walk or ride it part ways and then do some, some of both, but basically it was walking. Unfortunately, my route was just as far on the other edge of town as where I live from. Yeah, we got to get exercise, I guess.
Stacy: Yeah, that's true. So, you delivered the paper that announced that Pearl Harbor was bombed, right?
Hubert: Yes, even the only time I think the local paper ran a special edition. Yeah, they put out one that Sunday afternoon. We had to deliver paper that Sunday afternoon.
Stacy: What was it like to be the person delivering that, that information? I mean, that was shocking.
Hubert: Well, actually, I guess we, it didn't dawn on us quite the magnitude of it. I don't think what it really entailed. And we didn't have near the coverage, of course, today, you was bombed, you had no, not a lot of information as to how much damage was done. I didn't realize how much loss there was. Loss of lives and loss of ships.
Stacy (as narrator): Two and a half years later, he went down with his mom to the recruiting office and joined the Navy.
Hubert: I think it was a matter of about three weeks that you went home until they call you up for duty and I got notice to report to Kansas City such and such a time and from there they put us on the train to Great Lakes, a naval boot camp we called it.
Stacy: And so when you got the notice and you leave to go, how were you feeling in that moment?
Hubert: I guess I'm excited, but I was looking forward to going, I mean, I knew it was coming up and I just, was just a change of life, but there's not the end of the world.
Stacy: Was that the first time you had left home?
Hubert: For any length of time at all, yes.
Stacy (as narrator): Hubert goes to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. Then on to Shoemaker Naval Distribution Center, one of the facilities built during World War II to help train and deploy sailors to the Pacific. The base was eventually closed after the war.
Hubert: And I was sent back up to Bremerton, Washington, that's where we went on the ship. It was in dry dock at that time.
Stacy: Okay.
Hubert: It had been hit by a kamikaze plane and they came back in for repairs and they were just finishing up when I went aboard.
Stacy (as narrator): The ship he's referring to is the USS Lexington, one of the most decorated ships of World War II. According to the National Park Service, the USS Lexington participated in almost every major World War II naval campaign in the Pacific, from 1943 to 1945. The ship was responsible for destroying or damaging some 900,000 tons of enemy cargo. And the planes that flew from the Lexington destroyed nearly 850 enemy aircraft.
Hubert: And I went back out to the Pacific, back to the same thing. Bombing the islands and Marines, who I respect a great deal, off to one island after another. And it was just that slow attrition to getting back to where we finally won the war. And at the end, uh, Well, it was August 15th. I'll never forget it. We were bombing the north end of Japan, I guess, getting ready for the invasion and came over the squawk box at 10 o'clock. They told us pilots to drop their planes and come back to the ship. The war was over. And that was the best news we ever had.
Stacy: What happened? After you got that news, what did everybody do?
Hubert: Oh, they gave us a can of warm beer and that was it.
Stacy: So you got one warm can of beer and celebrated and then went back to business, huh?
Hubert: Yeah, that was it. Yeah. And the Admiral Halsey would have it all on the battleship Missouri, so they can actually sign where the Admiral was. But had Mitchell still been the Admiral on our carrier, we would probably had the honor, but we did get to go into Tokyo Bay as one of the ships that went in for the signing and I got a couple, two days, half day liberties over in Tokyo, which was nothing left, it had just been leveled. And now to see the pictures of it today, it's unbelievable, of course, what they have done since then. But we wiped everything out, now they've got all the modern city there, but it was horrible at that time.
Stacy (as narrator): I couldn't find the USS Lexington on the list of ships at the official signing, but it was indeed the first heavy fleet carrier to move into Tokyo Bay after the signing took place. The ship is now a museum in Corpus Christi, Texas. Hubert visited a few years ago. He told me that during his visit he insisted on going down to his old fire room, number three, where he worked as a fireman. I asked him to tell me about that fire room.
Hubert: Well, it's a, it's a hot, closed place there. And, like, pig iron doesn't change much, so it really looked about the same, although it was kind of in desolate shape. It wouldn’t have passed inspection, but it hadn't been brought back up to, so called tourist spot. They had one of the other fire rooms, I guess it's fixed up for it, but I just wanted to see the old one, so we saw it, but it was a very narrow place. You got just about six or eight foot between the boilers. There's boilers on each side of them, and you had your burner men that worked the burners and water tenders that took the water level up, and it was a key job.
Without the boilers, the ships were dead, so we considered it the heart of the ship, but it's at the bottom of the ocean, too. We were 27 foot below the waterline.
Stacy: Was that a strange feeling, or did you not really think about it, too?
Hubert: I think it bothered probably a lot more people. If you had claustrophobia, it would have been a hell of a problem. But actually, for me, it was just another place to be. And actually, it was kind of like a daytime job. The fire personnel stood four on and eight off, and that was it, you did your four hours of duty, and then you rested or did whatever, and you went to battle station, we all went down to the fire room, that was your battle station, and you were going to be there until the end, because in case you got hit, you didn't leave the ship until they blew the barrel went over the mountain, and I said by that time you probably wouldn't be around anyway.
Stacy: Oh, that's a scary thought.
Hubert: A scary thought, yeah, that's right.
Stacy: So, when you were on the ship and you were down in the fire room, would you think about that kind of thing? Or you just did your job?
Hubert: Not really. No. No, no need dwelling on it. I'm not a fatalist, but I fully believe that when I was born, a mark went on the wall or when the Lord's gonna cut me off, so I go every day with the same thing. I hope it'll give me another day, but there's nothing guaranteed.
Stacy: I love that philosophy, you know, just live life as, as it comes, right?
Hubert: Right. Correct. Trust in the Lord and live your life.
Stacy: So you know, educate me, what did a fire, what does a fireman do?
Hubert: Well, you're boiler consisted of, uh, you've got two sides. You got the, what's called a saturated side, then you've got the super heat side. And you've got five or six burners in the saturated side, and then on the superheated side, you've got five burners over there.
And what it does on the superheated side, it gets the steam so totally dry that there's not a drop of water in it, because that steam then is what runs the turbines that runs the ship. And those fins in there, it's so delicate that a drop of water would bend them and throw the thing out of sync. So, the main thing is keep the ship going and then, of course, it also powers the generators.
Everything runs off of steam on the ship. It generates your own electricity. You do have some diesel engines that help along with it. But basically, steam runs the ship. And our job was to, when you got ready to go to sea, we were the first ones. Twelve hours early, we went down and started getting the boilers warmed up. And, when we hit port, we was the last ones to shut down. After they got everything hooked up to the shore and stuff, then we could try to shut down. So, we always considered ourselves the heart of the ship.
Stacy: Were you normally with the same people over and over again in the fire room, or did it change up who you were with?
Hubert: The crews were split up in three watches, and the personnel at the fire room each signed an A, B, and C watch, and your bunch stayed the same. So you was on duty with the same fellas every day, except for general quarters under war conditions. The whole fleet went all down there. Some of us signed at different stations, but in case of damage control and all that stuff.
All three watches was in the fire room at General Quarters which generally started about three o'clock in the morning when they started launching the planes and it lasted till maybe six thirty, seven at night. Depends how long of what action we were in.
Stacy (as narrator): I had never heard the term General's Quarters, so I asked him what that meant. He said it's when you were in combat readiness. Everyone had to go to their assigned stations. Even the cooks had special places. Everything would be on lockdown, he said, and you'd stay at your station all day long. Once they secured, normal ship life would resume.
Hubert: Well, it means you’re, you could be under attack or you was definitely, your planes was taking off and bombing the, we were, basically, we were bombing the islands for the Marines and those to land. We started Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Saipan, all the different islands. The ships and fleets tried to bomb and soften things up and then the Marines would go in and try to take over. Each one of them was always a tough fight. We never got much. It didn't seem like we took too much stuff out.
Stacy (as narrator): When everyone was at their battle stations during General's Quarters, he said it got awful hot down in the fire room because there were so many firemen there together at one time. Then we talked about what it was like during normal operations.
Hubert: You got four hours on and, eight hours – and wasn’t much to do on your eight hours off. Daytime, you, you couldn't go up on deck or anything because of war activity was going on. In peacetime, I expect it to be a lot different, but in the wartime, you kind of went down in a galley or wherever you had someplace, you might play cards or something, or sit around and just shoot the bull, as they say. But, uh, kill time, or else wait for the chow line, and then go to work
Stacy: Who? Who are the people you would shoot the bull with?
Hubert: Well, it's just a different, I had two or three good buddies. One was Rice and one was Evan. I've lost track of 'em since then. I'm not sure if they're still around.
Stacy: Yeah.
Hubert: I went down when they had the 80th Avenue anniversary of the ship’s being christened, and we went down for the party that they had on the ship board, and I was only World War II veteran that was there.
Hubert: So there's not too many of us kicking around.
Stacy: Yeah.
Hubert: That had been on the ship, I mean, that had served on, on the Lexington. There's, there's, there's getting fewer WWII veterans around also. That's a fact.
Stacy (as narrator): I hope you enjoyed the first part of this conversation with Mr. Hubert Seipel and a special thanks to him for his willingness to be the very first guest on this new show. I'd also like to thank his granddaughter and my dear friend, Melissa Seipel, for her support of the long-held idea for this show and for helping Mr. Seipel with his end of the remote interview. Be sure to listen to episode two to hear the second part of Mr. Seipel's interview, where he shares more about his time in the war, his advice for a happy marriage, and what he thinks are the keys to a happy life.
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Thanks for listening.